With this version comes long-awaited color management in Microsoft's browser. After IE9 is released and is adopted widely, virtually all the web browsers (IE, FireFox, Safari, Chrome) will provide color management. The balance will have tipped decisively.

Okay, so maybe IE9 won't be adopted instantly, but I predict it may well be adopted fairly quickly. It really does seem to work well, and even in public beta it already is on a few percent of the computers out there. And who knows, Microsoft could roll it out as a Windows Update.

Another given is that wide gamut displays are becoming more and more common.

What does this mean?

1. People who have wide gamut monitors and calibrated systems (or a monitor-specific profile other than the default sRGB profile) will see Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB images with more vivid colors than they will see in sRGB images.

2. Images that have already been posted with a color space other than sRGB will of course become livelier, as their dull, lifeless color will be accurate, and they'll look more consistent across virtually all the browsers. Finally.

In general, if we subscribe to the notion that livelier, more saturated colors catch attention better, you could say that publishing wide gamut images is becoming more attractive in the brave new world of ubiquitous color managed browsing.

So... Should we start publishing in wider gamut color spaces? If not now, when?

Of course, some people will still be running old web browsers. A few percent of my site visitors still run IE6 or older today. Include IE7 and it goes up to 10%. But these may not be the people with money to spend.

Publishing images as sRGB will probably remain the most consistent way to go for a little while longer. But we chance sRGB looking plain, dull, and lifeless next to more brightly colored images on the competition's web site.

Maybe the trend will be to move toward publishing without a color profile. At first blush that sounds like a bad idea, but wait: Some browsers just put such images on screen without doing any color transforms... IE9 does this and the image will use the full gamut of whatever display it's shown on. You might ask, "won't it look garish on a wide gamut monitor?" Sure,but isn't that kind of the goal with advertising? "Garish, in your face" sells more than "accurate". Use as much of each user's display as possible.

But maybe the better way to do that would be to publish images tagged with the widest possible gamut - ProPhoto RGB. With proper color management, surely an image could use all of the color gamut any conceivable monitor could give. But there might be weirdities with the way things outside the monitor gamut look.

Okay, perhaps Adobe RGB could be the right middle ground. More gamut than sRGB, not so much that it lays bare the differences between adjacent colors in 8 bit format, and it can carry pretty much all the colors that modern monitors can show.

None of this is new. I just figured with a major new entry into the color managed browser stable just around the corner, perhaps it's a good time to think about it again.

sRGB, done. Even with color managed browsers; without calibration and wide gamut displays the whole issue of color accuracy on the web is a moot point. I still have to meet my first client who doesn't need to see my printed portfolio.

People in the industry (your clients) know how to set up their displays, so I wouldn't worry too much about them not seeing your images as you intended them to be.

I was also thrilled to learn that Microsoft IE 9 RC supports some aspects of color management, e.g. images with attached color profiles (like Adobe RGB) will be converted to sRGB before being displayed.

Sadly though, if you have a wide-gamut monitor as many photo professionals do, the color calibration of your monitor is ignored. This is strange since even the rather basic Windows 7 Photo Viewer supports color management.

This is incredible and hugely disappointing. Why did Microsoft even bother? Ignoring the monitor profile means IE is still not color managed, simple as that.

Microsoft is really hitting the brakes here, on a development that finally seemed to gain some momentum (not the least because of wide gamut monitors). Of course most people never bother to profile their monitors anyway, so nothing new there. But with IE on board, that would have been a massive force in pushing color management forward, to what would begin to look suspiciously like a standard.

Let's just hope for the secret switch, and that they plan to unveil it in due course.

Mine are, within tolerances I consider quite workable, and I use the sRGB profile for them, so actually IE9 will be less intolerable for me than some.

Literally, NOTHING is exact in the real world. As an Engineer, I follow a philosophy in which achieving goals depends on setting practical tolerances.

A color profiling system will not achieve perfection. The good ones even tell you how far off they are.

I'm fond of the old joke where an Engineer and a Scientist are told that their goal is to go meet a very attractive woman currently standing across the room. The only restriction is that they are only allowed to walk half the distance from where they are to her every 10 seconds. The Scientist never starts, immediately having concluded that theoretically it's never going to be possible to go the whole distance. After pondering this in place for just a moment he hears the engineer, now almost all the way to the other side of the room, say "Hi there!"

Yes, of course a calibrator has tolerances, but it quickly gets you closer than anything else. Not everybody will need that level of accuracy. As I think I said in another thread, it's like a carpenter's level.

But more important, I think, is the cognitive brick wall many people run into when their colors are off. Not having a monitor profile, other than the default sRGB, they simply can't wrap their heads around the simple "source profile -> destination profile" equation that color management revolves around. With that in mind, troubleshooting is often a lot easier.

But - maybe I'm splitting hairs - I'm curious about one thing: how can you know they are, if you don't measure them with a colorimeter? Gamma varies, positions of the three primaries vary (as with the wide gamuts), it's not just the overall color balance. Those things can't be reliably judged by eye.

And since I sort of started this "sub-discussion", I should make my point clear so people don't get confused:

When you calibrate a monitor, it's not really the calibrating part that's important in a color management context. You can even skip that (if the software allows it, and the monitor is a good one). The really important part is the profiling. This is where the software, after the calibration is finished, builds a profile which is a full description of the monitor's color space in three dimensions. This is what a true color managed application will use, and convert from the source profile into.

Imagine starting with monitors advertised to provide the sRGB gamut, then instead of creating a profile, manually adjusting the curves in the video card and the on-monitor controls to make the response as sRGB-like as possible. It's actually very close.

Not the typical approach, but my displays exactly match one another, they match my prints done locally, and they match those I get from print houses.

The chief reason I've taken this approach is that I find advantages to using sRGB as reference monitor profiles in my software development work. I start with that as a reference then I can slide in other profiles to do specific testing.

(...) the response as sRGB-like as possible. It's actually very close.

OK. But how can you know, without measuring? I'd take the advertised bit with a grain of salt.

sRGB as reference monitor profiles

Reference to what, exactly? What you're effectively doing is to take color management out of the equation. The reference becomes no color management at all (like IE). Of course sRGB is the default in Windows, but beyond that every monitor is different. People do see different colors on the web (using IE), even though it's all sRGB.

A color managed application like Photoshop will behave exactly like IE if you use a monitor profile that is the same as the document profile. You could even take an sRGB file, assign (not convert) Adobe RGB in Photoshop, and then use Adobe RGB as the monitor profile. Both are clearly wrong, and yet it would look the same. Inversely, you could use the monitor profile both places, same result. Each profile needs to correctly describe its corresponding color space.

manually adjusting the curves in the video card

A calibrator will do that (making a video LUT), among other things. So why go to all that trouble, when a device will do it for you, and better, in five minutes?

The reason this is important is for file exchangeability. If you get a good match from your print house, you're lucky. But if one day you don't (and it will happen), who do you blame? Of course, if you make your own prints and never have to send anything out, this doesn't apply. But imagine a big press run involving a lot of money...

There's a very simple test for all this: With a properly profiled monitor, open an sRGB image in Photoshop. Then pull up the same image in IE, and put them side by side. Do you see a difference? That is how much your monitor differs from sRGB.

If you do the same with sRGB as monitor profile, they will by necessity be identical.

It seems perhaps you feel some need to try to talk me out of my setup, but please understand it's not going to happen.

I know about color management. I can teach it. I implement it in my software. I know exactly what I gain and lose by using a puck to calibrate and profile my setup. That I have ended back up on Microsoft's default is by design. Please don't be offended by that.

I've made the choice to set my system up the way I have on purpose, because of the advantages I get from having done so. Now you understand the wording choice I made above when I said "not all monitors are sRGB".

Please don't forget who started this thread praising Microsoft for embracing color management, and who was disappointed to find they apparently missed half of the task! You also might begin to understand why I didn't notice that right away while testing IE9.

I did find a number of reports of the "ignores the monitor profile" problem on the IE9 feedback site, and I added my own as well.

The encouraging thing is that they did acknowledge another report I submitted, where I pointed out that the page title isn't visible anywhere if you deconfigure tabbed browsing. I have hopes they'll fix that prior to the actual release. Wow, actual acknowledgement from Microsoft... Normally they're thoroughly unreachable.

I'm not trying to talk you out of anything. My comments are not necessarily directed at you, but to all the other people reading this. This is a public discussion, and we have an audience here. Nothing personal.

The IE developers acknowledged the issue (it was reported by quite a few people) but made absolutely no attempt to hint at a resolution or whether they even consider it a problem.

Sometimes I take heat for running an sRGB reference system, but I seem to be Microsoft's poster child with this setup. I don't know what I'll do when these monitors burn out and I have to embrace wide gamut models. They're already over 6 years old.

Heckle?Heckle???This is getting ridiculous.You just can't stand being corrected, can you?

As I said, I don't care what you do. I care about accurate information, and throwing out a phrase like "sRGB reference system", which is frankly bs, is just wildly confusing.

In my line of work, an "sRGB reference system" would be a fast ticket to unemployment. Right now I have 120 files to hand over to our design agency, who will in turn send the finished book to the printer next week. Believe me, we don't have time for niceties.

To everybody else (not Mr. Carboni) who might be reading this, and not get anything out of this exchange: Terminology matters. It's a tool for understanding.

Lots of people struggle with the issue of colors on the web, and that is not limited to wide gamut monitors. These things are not complicated, but in order to understand the underlying concepts must be clear.

That's what I'm getting at (but it doesn't seem to be worth the trouble).

Reference system means exactly what it says. Because it isn't yours and your client (you do have one that is agreed upon with them, right? Or at least, a reliable and consistent conversion) doesn't mean he is full of bs. Private reference systems are quite common in measurement and calibration labs, with the caveat that they be traceable to a general reference system which possesses greater accuracy and repeatability if the output of the lab has others dependent on it. (It's interesting to note that the first thing Tektronix wanted you to know upon hiring at least for the field was calibration and standards. Before I was allowed to sign off on anything, I was subjected to 6 months training, a large part of which was calibration.)

If I view Noel's images, I'm going to confirm opening them as sRGB.

That being said, I am troubled by the plethora of references, and the multiplication of viewing problems associated with wide gamut and such.

Digital Color has along way to go before I will be content with any proposed workflow as "standard".

And I'll ask again: reference to what? A valid reference is an accurate description of the monitor, ie a profile. sRGB is also a description of a monitor, but a

much less accurate one, and thus useless as a reference to anything.

But the main point I'm trying to make is that this doesn't have to be complicated. The simple equation applies: source profile -> destination profile. As long as both profiles describe their respective color spaces accurately,the colors will be reproducible across systems. Why is that? It's because all profiles relate directly to absolute values in Lab/XYZ. There's your standard.

What I sense in this thread is a missing distinction between calibration and profiling. Calibration is what Noel Carboni does, in his own way. But calibration doesn't have to be accurate, and rarely is. Calibration affects everything you see on the monitor, and has nothing to do with color management as such.

Profiling takes the state of the monitor, post calibration, in detail, and makes a map. This value corresponds to that Lab/XYZ value. The profile is then used as destination profile in a perfectly standard color management chain. There is no uncertainty, within tolerances. But those tolerances are much narrower than those of the eye.

If the profile does not describe the color space accurately, colors will be off. And that's what we're discussing here: is it possible to manipulate a given particular monitor to match sRGB? Thinking you can do that - by eye, no less! - is to put it mildly incredibly naive. It's more than adjusting a few sliders.

And here's a catch - I'll repeat this for emphasis: Using the same profile as source and destination means no conversion is taking place. That's the definition of a non color managed application. People say you can't turn off color management in Photoshop, but you can and that's the way. It doesn't matter if your monitor is "calibrated" or not. Photoshop will behave exactly like Internet Explorer. All bets are off: it looks like this on my monitor, and like that on yours.

Using the same profile as source and destination means no conversion is taking place. That's the definition of a non color managed application. People say you can't turn off color management in Photoshop, but you can and that's the way. It doesn't matter if your monitor is "calibrated" or not. Photoshop will behave exactly like Internet Explorer. All bets are off: it looks like this on my monitor, and like that on yours.

I was going to write a response to this here, but I'm done playing this silly game; I'd really rather help other people instead.

Feel free to type all the stuff like this you want until you're tired. Have fun!

I think enough information is on the table here for people to judge for themselves. Everything I've said is easily verifiable.

Why is this getting so personal? When something is wrong, I say so. That's how public forums work. If I say something wrong, others will let me know.

Others have, or do you mean other than me? Or anyone else that doesn't agree with you?

What's it to you if he wants to post his methodology here or anywhere else? I don't use it but at the same time, I don't use lots of methods others use. Does that make them or me wrong?

You are the one taking it personally, imo. Looking at your stats, you seem to have arrived just to take up the cudgel left behind when we went this round before.Perhaps a re-incarnation of one or another who left in a huff.